What do you think caused the cambrian explosion?

Question

Personal opinions are welcome and if you have any articles or sources about this that would be great!

Answer 1

Speculation:
a) There was no "explosion" -- it's just an artifact of us not having good fossils of soft-bodied in the millions of years leading up to the non-event.

Total "pulling it out of my hat" speculation:
b) biomineralization spread quickly to a lot of very different animals in a very short period of time. There may have been a mechanism at that time, perhaps a virus, that was able to transfer biomineralization genes between very different animals.

What the Intelligent Design crowd might say:
c) The initiation of Cambrian Explosion represents a time when the Intelligent Designer(s) actively made changes to the developing life on Earth.

Answer 2

Opportunity. First off, there was a lot of time over which the Cambrian Explosion occurred. Many millions of years, so it's not exactly an "explosion" so much as a development. As some species evolved, that created many more niches for others. In that sense life begets a lot more opportunities for life. If life moves into a desolate area, it creates niches, which creates more niches, which creates more niches, and so on.

Answer 3

The precambrian TNT. Actually, think of it as kind of a critical-mass effect: there had been a gradual build-up in organism complexity to the point where living organisms developed that were able to exploit the huge variety of unoccupied 'niches' (combination of life-style, living conditions, available food-types, etc.). Once that point was reached, diversification happened in an eye-blink, geologically speaking - all those available resources, hardly any competition; it must have been like a sort of paradise!

Answer 4

empty niches of that era. high pressure of first predatory species. rich resources. adaptability of the arthropoda body.